By Dr. Bituminous Q. Floyd,
Federal Inspector General of
Suspicious Happenstances
Good day, gentlemen.
This is a prerecorded briefing
made prior to Aardvark Al’s historic leap into Mooburg Gorge. For security reasons of the highest importance
the contents of this briefing have been known only by your A901-grade Graviton Particle,
affectionately known as Smike.
Now that you are orbiting the
planet Fridlap, and the whole crew is revived, we can now tell you that your
entire journey has been a gigantic waste of time. We’re sorry about it, but
there it is. It’s the last time we’ll trust a cat who licks driveways.
We can now tell you that eighteen
months ago, scientists at the Roger T. Bedpan Laboratory for the Exploration of
Unexplored Space believed that they had discovered the first evidence of a
fully mobile intelligent cybernetic organism on Earth. This intelligence, they reported, was
buried 40 feet below the surface of a garbage dump five kilometers east of
Mooburg, Ontario. Except for a single very powerful radio emission aimed at the
planet Fridlap, the four-million year old aardvark (now known in the scientific
literature as Aardvark Al) has remained completely incoherent. His insane rants
are still a total mystery to us.
As soon as we were able to fit
the organism with a Class Three (aardvark snout optimized) straightjacket, the poor
quadruped began babbling about Quonset huts,
which as we all know, were developed at the start of World War II, in 1941,
when the US Navy realized it would soon need more large cheese-shaped buildings
to put people in. Mr. Aardvark’s babblings went something like this:
“The Navy went to the George A. Fuller construction
company in New York, well known for constructing brushes of all types and
selling them door to door.
Fuller immediately ran into some logistics problems. For one thing, they
were plumb out of cheese. But they had plenty of unsold brushes. The Navy said
no, if you don't mind, housing people in large brushes is a dumb idea. Why not
use galvanized steel?
The Fuller people said maybe, but they're probably
going to end up looking like brushes anyway.
So the Navy called in a consultant from the Portland
Longhorn Cheese company, who explained the traditional Longhorn shape, which
looked nothing like a brush. Quonset huts actually look like a large, galvanized hunk of Longhorn
cheese -- with a large door in it, of course. Good luck making a sandwich out
of a Quonset hut.”
Needless
to say, we ran through three legal secretaries (who became increasingly
bewildered while writing this stuff down) before we decided to put a muzzle on
said aardvark.
The
remaining investigation was centered on a cybernetic hookup to Mr. Aardvark’s
brain, during which we discovered that the entire scope of his rantings were
just that: incoherent babblings that existed solely in the mind of one Al J.
Aardvark. Mr. Aardvark never was arrested in a donut shop, there never was a
Thundering Bluejeans Dude Ranch, he never had a conversation with Hermann
Hesse, and he never fell into Mooburg Gorge wrestling with his non-existent arch-enemy,
Morton Slaf-Kabnecier.
The name of this last non-personage should have given this insanity away. Even
a third-grader would
realize, after cursory inspection, that the name spelled backwards constitutes
a brazen slap in the face of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the well-respected writer
and paleoanthropological
explorer of Piltdown, Sussex fame.
We feel it is important for this commission to
apologize, not only to our crewmembers, fruitlessly orbiting the planet Fridlap
as we speak, but also to the two readers who have chanced upon Mr. Aardvark’s
ramblings unaware of the dangers of so doing.
If we have caused you any social embarrassment as a
result of reading these insanities we are truly, humbly, and irrevocably sorry.
Not to mention transmogragraphically regretful.
Yours, in true health, through the purity and essence of
our natural fluids,
Dr. Bituminous Q. Floyd,
Federal Inspector General of
Suspicious Happenstances
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